Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 64763 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 324(@200wpm)___ 259(@250wpm)___ 216(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64763 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 324(@200wpm)___ 259(@250wpm)___ 216(@300wpm)
Preferably by me. Not because I was dying to see those washboard abs in person. Not at all.
“I want to know why you’re so bothered,” she said. “He wasn’t as injured as you thought. This is the first patient…” She cleared her throat. “Man… who you’ve ever thought about going to his house to check on. There’s more here.”
She might be my baby sister, but she wasn’t much of a baby. She knew me well enough to read into my actions. Dammit.
I sped up as the canyon ended and opened up into a wide prairie. I wasn’t more than twenty miles from Cooper Valley, but I’d never been on this side of the mountains before. The pines that dotted the rugged canyon disappeared. The land was almost flat, only slight undulations in the landscape. The river curved in the distance, trees lining the bank in spots making it picturesque. This was the Montana of my fantasies. Open ranges. Big skies. Vast land and no people.
“Audrey.” She prompted me since I’d been quiet as I ogled the view. “Tell me about this hot cowboy.”
“I didn’t say he was hot,” I protested.
She laughed, the sound loud through my cell. “You didn’t have to. Please, I have no boyfriend, and there isn’t a guy in my program who’s even an option. They’re more into math equations than breasts. Let me live vicariously through you. What’s his name?”
“Boyd Wolf.”
She was quiet for a few seconds. “I’m doing a search for him because any guy who lights your fire must be… holy shit, woman. No wonder you’re driving to his house. Do you have sexy undies on?”
I gasped, then laughed. “I can’t believe you just said that.”
I did have on my nicest underwear, a bra and panty set that matched and wasn’t made of simple cotton. I also put on makeup, kept my hair down instead of up in a usual sloppy bun and had tried on three different outfits. All for Boyd Wolf. Maybe I really was crazy, putting effort into a guy who was sooooo wrong for me.
“He’s not badly injured, you found that out. He’s hot as hell, and you touched his abs. Don’t you want to touch the rest of him? I’m looking at his pictures online, and I want to lick him from stern to mast.”
I rolled my eyes and couldn’t help but smile. Marina was twenty-one and single. Someone eighty and married would find him hot.
“There’s just something weird about it,” I said. “I know what I saw, what I treated. I can’t explain it.”
It was as if there’d been magic involved. Sleight of hand where you saw a quarter in a hand and the next minute it was in a glass bottle. I saw his wounds. I saw the way he’d been able to hurry out of the hospital a short time later. It made no sense. I couldn’t let it go.
“What I want to know is why you’re thinking so much about this guy when you had Mr. Hot Rancher on the hook last week.”
I frowned. “Who? Jett Markle?”
“From what you told me about him, he’s one tall glass of water.”
“He’s also self-centered, authoritarian and did nothing for me,” I grumbled. Jett was thirty-five, handsome in the clean cut, preppy sort of way. His brown hair was parted, well cut and groomed. His smile was broad, but I wondered if it were as fake as the veneers on his teeth. His clothes fit in with Montana. Jeans, simple button-up shirts, leather boots. He was just… polished. Fake. He was playing at being a cowboy whereas Boyd was all cowboy.
There I went, using Boyd Wolf as husband measuring stick.
“But Boyd Wolf did.”
“Exactly,” I replied before I caught myself.
“Ha! I was right. You never told me what happened with Jett.”
“We went to a fancy steak place. He ordered for me.”
“What?” she practically squawked.
“Yeah, I mean, I don’t even like lamb. And rare, yuck! Then he told me about how he’d retired from a hedge fund company at thirty-five and bought a big piece of land to fulfill the lifelong dream of being a rancher.”
“Hedge fund company?”
“New York City,” I replied.
“Does he actually ranch?”
“I have no idea. I can’t imagine him getting his hands dirty let alone riding a horse or castrating calves. He lives on this side of the mountains.” I put on my blinker and turned when my GPS said. I’d remembered Boyd mentioning the name of his family property, Wolf Ranch. It wasn’t hard to forget when it was his last name. It had been easy to search and plug in for directions. “While most people live in the town, the older homesteads, probably like Wolf Ranch, are over here. Also, the big parcels for the moved-to-Montana folk like Jett.”
“So I guess the date was a one-time thing?” she asked. “If he’s that bad within the first hour, it’s not worth a second go.”